The Virtual Care and Feeding of Educational Leaders: Exploring Social Structure, Influence, and Content Exchange in Social Media

• In Event: Educators Meet the Fifth Estate: Social Media in Education

Abstract

In realizing the goal of meeting complex educational challenges, high quality, sustained, and relevant principal professional development has been recognized as a key factor that can contribute to this development and change. Although some formal development opportunities are in place for school leaders, they do not always seem to fit the needs and requirements of leaders and their unique contexts. As a result, leaders are increasingly searching for, and depending on, (informal) networks to engage in discussions, share relevant and high quality resources, and further enhance their knowledge and practices.

A growing body of research around leadership and networks (Daly, 2010) shows that these more informal social ecosystems in which practices/tools/approaches move are consequential to access, use, and diffusion of practices/tools/approaches and their relationship to student outcomes. Although we have some growing work on the role of informal networks of leaders and their relationship to other leaders from face to face networks, the role of online spaces/social media for educational leaders has not been as carefully examined. The limited studies that have been completed around school leaders in online spaces suggests that educational leaders use online networks for forming communities of practice, which is critical given the typical professional isolation of school leaders. Within these communities, leaders draw on connections primarily for educational purposes suggesting that school leaders are use social media connections for professional exchanges much more than the general public.

In this longitudinal work we present social network and Twitter data from 2 years of collection from July 2017-July 2019 in which we tracked several key educational leadership hashtags (e.g. leadupchat, edadmin, principalsinaction, etc.) in order to visualize the network and identify influencers. Over this period the network remained consistently active resulting in a collection of 1,000,000 tweets reflecting over 130,00 unique actors who interacted around 15,000 unique hashtags. Our analysis reveals the overall network structure of the educational leadership virtual space highlighting several key structural dimensions as well as a host of highly influential actors. In addition, we identified the major hashtags in which educational leaders were interacting which went beyond the initial run. We also identified the top 1% of actors and hashtags in the educational leadership space. However, most relevant to the learning of leaders we were able to track the shared URLs within tweets to specific resources that leaders were sharing.

Results around leadership professional development indicate that leaders often turned to the business literature for books and articles to share as well as drawing on a host of anecdotes and messages of inspiration and support. We found limited evidence of high quality evidence based material that was being widely shared across the network, with “lists” of things to do in practice being some of the most widely shared. This research represents some of the earliest efforts in analyzing the virtual networks of educational leaders and provides insights into the online world of educational leaders.

Author

• Alan J. Daly, University of California - San Diego